You Want a Portrait of Failure in Iraq? Try Joe Biden

Which American has done the most harm to Iraq in the 21st century? The competition is stiff, with former President George W. Bush, former Vive President Dick Cheney, former deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, among others, to choose from. But, given his game efforts to grab the spotlight, it seems churlish not to make the case for Vice President Joe Biden.

As he rarely failed to mention while a presidential candidate, Biden traveled to Iraq seven times between the 2003 invasion and the 2008 primary elections. He has made several more trips as number-two man in the Obama White House, most recently during the July 4 weekend to “reaffirm” the United States’ commitment to Iraq amid the throes in Baghdad to form a new government. As evidenced by the frequent flying to the Iraqi capital, Biden is the point man for Iraq in the Obama administration, a job he seems to have been given as part of the president’s surrender of foreign policy to his campaign rivals, chiefly Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The drafting of Biden was intended to lend foreign policy heft to the young Barack Obama’s candidacy. Biden was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his many fans in the mainstream press reliably cheer his “seriousness” about international issues, as compared to other Democrats. However, this reputation is bizarre, given his actual record. Indeed, the outsourcing of Iraq policy to Biden shows what a low priority the country is for the White House, which is primarily concerned to bolster the narrative that, come September 1, the US war in Iraq will be over.

Faced with challenges to that storyline, such as the wrangling over a new Iraqi government, the White House really has no idea what to do. Its fallback position is to plead that the government be “representative,” a fine concept that cloaks the deepest flaw in the United States’ view of Iraqi politics.

Biden stumped for president as a critic of the Iraq war, a persona he invented on the fly, as it were, because public opinion when it came to the Iraqi mission unaccomplished was souring. In 2002, he voted for Bush’s authorization of force resolution, calling Iraq’s former leader, Saddam Hussein, “an inevitable threat” to global security.

But he will be remembered for the “Biden plan” that he developed later, with advice from the former congressional staffer, ambassador, and, most recently, disgraced United Nations official in Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, recommending that Washington encourage the devolution of the Iraqi state into three autonomous federal regions – one “Sunni,” one “Shiite” and one “Kurdish.” This cockamamie idea, all the more inexplicable coming from a senator who boasted of his multiple visits to Iraq, both drew upon and fed the fiction that Iraq is uniquely artificial among the nation-states of the world.